The present invention relates to a graphic user interface client-server routing system and a method of operating a routing system.
As rates of personal car ownership increase, road congestion is becoming a greater problem. One solution to combat the problem is car-pooling. It is known to operate server based car pooling systems within large organizations, where a driver stores his route information, including start and destination location as well as time of departure, on a server and potential passengers can then scan for suitable drivers. There are already a number of organizations running private or non-profit car-pooling systems on the Internet. These all operate through a similar text based user interface where drivers specify their start and end locations through which a passenger must either search manually or for whom the car-pool organization searches.
Such systems, however, are not very scalable and it may be difficult for a potential passenger to pick drivers that may in fact be suitable. This is because a driver may input, for example, London and Glasgow as start and end destinations, whereas a passenger travelling from Birmingham to Manchester, may not realize that their journey is a subset of that specified by the driver or, even if they do, it may be too difficult for a passenger to scan all such possibilities for a suitable start time.
Numerous U.S. Patents describe map based routing systems or client-server car-sharing systems including U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,875; U.S. Pat. No. 5,272,638; U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,676 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,313. None, however, disclose a system including all of the advantages of the present invention.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a routing system comprising: one or more maps; route defining means instantiable to respond to driver interaction with a map to define a proposed pooling route and to store said pooling route; request defining means instantiable to respond to passenger interaction to define a request for a pooling route; search means instantiable to search stored pooling routes for one or more pooling routes suitable for said request; and addition means responsive to passenger selection of a suitable pooling route to include a passenger on said route.
It will be appreciated that in the present description the term xe2x80x9cdriverxe2x80x9d is used for someone providing information about a proposed route, it may not necessarily be the party actually driving the vehicle, but as far as a passenger is concerned this person may as well be the driver. Similarly, the term xe2x80x9cpassengerxe2x80x9d is used for someone requesting information about a proposed route, and need not be the actual person travelling.